Empire operates through cultivated ignorance, not just distorted knowledge.

Evidence

Knowledge-production and its strategic absence—ignorance—are prevailing themes in the making of empire. Edward Said launched an entire field of colonial studies on the basic Foucauldian principle that distorted forms of knowledge were fundamental features of empire and its ruling technologies. In one of his last pieces, on the Iraq War, he characterized U.S. empire as one steeped in a deep “historical illiteracy,” one produced by a “cultivated ignorance” that celebrated a “sacrosanct altruism” for what have been brutally calculated imperial interventions. W. E. B. Dubois captured that transposition much earlier in describing the historical distortions of American empire as predicated on a “deliberately educated ignorance” of the racist predicates of U.S. domestic and foreign power. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1335

Categorization

• XREF: Returns to Said’s Orientalism and its Foucauldian basis, connecting ignorance-studies to the reader’s colonial archival focus. — connects to: Empires affect vast regions while their home populations remain unaware those places exist. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 99
• QUESTION: Worth tracing how Said’s late Iraq framing and early Orientalism together define the knowledge/ignorance axis for colonial studies.